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LLM Student’s Paper is Published in Nebraska Law Review

LLM ’25 candidate Kiefer Stenseng’s paper, “The Jurisprudence of Statutory Interpretation: A Framework for the Logical Restraints of Legal Positivism and Textualism,” will be published in the Nebraska Law Review this fall.

April 03, 2025
Kiefer Stenseng LLM '25
Kiefer Stenseng LLM ’25

LLM ’25 candidate Kiefer Stenseng’s paper, “The Jurisprudence of Statutory Interpretation: A Framework for the Logical Restraints of Legal Positivism and Textualism,” will be published in the Nebraska Law Review this fall.

Since President Donald Trump’s first term in office, the Supreme Court has become increasingly dominated by justices that identify as textualists. In recent years, the Court’s environmental decisions (and the Court itself) have become the center of public scrutiny. As President Trump assumes his second term in office, how can legal experts and policy-makers better understand the trajectory of the current court?

The paper centers on recent Supreme Court case law, including the Court’s controversial Clean Water Act decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, to present a logical, normative approach to understanding statutory interpretation. The paper leverages positivist theories of the law and textualist methods of interpretation to establish a New Normative Framework of interpretation. Legal experts, policy-makers, and the public will all benefit from approaching the law under the Framework because it produces clear, intelligent guidelines for statutory interpretation and prevents legal decisions from being criticized solely based on their effect. Ultimately, a normative approach to interpretation better serves the Constitution and protects the separation of powers. By revisiting the interpretive role the judiciary plays, policy-makers can focus their efforts on establishing clear positive law through Congress rather than relying on court-based policy directives.

“I am grateful to Lewis and Clark for providing an opportunity to work on this paper as a part of my LLM studies,” Stenseng said about his experience writing this paper as part of an independent research project during his time as a student.

Individual research projects, like Stenseng’s, provide LLM students with the opportunity to gain greater knowledge about a specific area of environmental law that interests them under the supervision of a faculty member.

Read the full paper here.

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